“The fool knows after he’s suffered.”
— Hesiod
“Never tell a fool that he is a fool. All you’ll have is an angry fool.”
— Talmud
I think it’s a beautiful thing that we have one day each year that’s dedicated to fools because fools don’t get their due in this world. We’ve all played the fool at one time or another, haven’t we? Sometimes people fool us, sometimes we fool other people, and sometimes we fool ourselves. Acting the fool is how we learn from past mistakes and acquire wisdom, and it’s critical to personal growth. Indeed, one could argue that playing the fool is a huge part of life. So I find it wonderful that we celebrate foolery on April 1st each year.
But what is a fool, exactly?
Merriam-Webster defines ‘fool’ as ‘a person lacking in judgment or prudence,’ or ‘a person lacking in common powers of understanding or reason.’ By this definition, there are two kinds of fool. The first type is someone who’s clueless because they’re young, immature, or simply haven’t experienced something before, so they lack appropriate judgment and care in a given situation. Most people don’t understand the perils of a situation until they experience it first-hand. There’s hope for this kind of fool because they’ll learn eventually. Wisdom will follow, it’s just a matter of time and acquiring the necessary understanding through exposure to new teachers, experiences, and life lessons. This can be a long and painful process, but it’s the only way that this version of fool can metamorphose from an ignorant dipshit into a man or woman of the world.
The second type of fool is willfully stupid. They either lack the required intelligence to learn from their past experience, or they intentionally or unconsciously block themselves from doing so. This kind of fool is weak-minded, delusional, and disinterested in honest introspection, so there’s little hope for them. Indeed, they likely will remain a fool forever because they live in delusion and refuse to learn anything. Instead, they repeat the same patterns and mistakes over and over throughout their life, and then they wonder why nothing ever changes for them.
This sorry kind of fool deserves our pity, right Mr. T?
I’m oversimplifying here because in reality, foolery is more like pizza slices than the entire pizza. We may be very wise about some things in life but complete fools about other things. We’re all born and raised with strengths and weaknesses, and we don’t experience everything on the same timeline, so we all have blind spots. To me, the key factors in whether a fool can level up to Platinum Elite Status are whether they know what they don’t know; how willing they are to challenge their assumptions and change their behavior based on new experiences; and whether they’re able to tolerate short-term pain for long-term gain. Where and from whom the fool acquires knowledge and experience also matters. A fool who’s being ‘educated’ by another fool is still a fool. They’re just doubling down on ineptitude because fools love to rationalize the bad decisions of other fools. Foolery loves company.
My favorite depiction of a fool is on The Fool’s Tarot Card shown above because I have a personal connection to that particular Fool. Take a foolish walk with me, and I’ll explain.
Waaaaaay back in 1992, I was 23 years old and trying to figure out what to do with my life. This was a difficult time for me because I was incredibly confused and indecisive–almost paralyzed–about which career path I should take after graduating college. Sometimes I get stuck when I have too many options, and this period of my life was probably the worst I’ve ever felt in that regard. Eventually I narrowed it down to two choices. On the one hand, there was law school, a furtherance of my education, financial security, and The Road More Traveled. On the other hand, there was the Peace Corps or Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and eventually some type of foreign service–a path that involved financial risk, uncertainty, and thus, was The Road Less Traveled. I was so torn about this pivotal decision that I postponed my admission to law school for a year after having taken the prior year off after college to travel, experience different parts of the world, and just… think.
In the fall of ’91, my travels took me to Long Beach, California, where I lived for 9 months with a college friend before I returned to the East Coast to attend law school in a place that I’d barely visited and didn’t know at all: New York City. By the time I got to California, I’d pretty much decided to take The Road More Traveled, but I wasn’t confident about this decision, so during my brief life in California, I subconsciously cast a line into metaphysical waters to see if anything might happen that would change my mind or the course of my life. I even applied to a few law schools in California that were way out of my league because I liked it there so much. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get in anywhere. New York was my destiny.
One day, not long before I was set to return east, my roommate and I drove to Venice Beach so I could see it for the first time. I remember it was a gorgeous sunny day with nearly perfect life specimens walking around, biking, and rollerblading, which only intensified my angst about returning to the Right Coast. While we were walking on the paved boardwalk, I spotted an old woman sitting at a table and doing Tarot card readings. She was all by herself and stood out from everyone else. Something prompted me to approach her and have my reading done for $5. I knew nothing about the Tarot then, or what the cards meant. It was my first reading.
I sat down in the chair next to her, and she told me to ask myself a question–one question–and hold it in my mind for the cards to answer. My question was a general one: Am I choosing the right path for myself and where will it take me? (I know, that’s two questions.)
She shuffled the deck several times, and then laid the cards out face-down in a pattern on the table. One by one, she turned each card over and explained its meaning before proceeding to the next one. I still remember some of the cards that came up. Most were positive: The Magician, Justice, The Sun, and The World. When the Sun Card came up, she said ‘This is a very good card. You’re going to get what you want.’ Some of the cards were negative, including the Queen of Swords, which may have represented future Ex., but more likely, it was my girlfriend at the time who fucked me at the drive-through a few months later. A story for another day.
But the card I remember most was The Fool. When it appears upright (as it did), the Fool is a positive card representing innocence, freedom, adventure, travel, idealism, youth, spontaneity, and new beginnings, in addition to foolishness and carelessness. The woman told me that this was a good card to receive at my age because it meant that I was embarking on a new adventure, a new beginning that would take me to places I’d never been before. She had me look more closely at the card and pointed out how the young man on the card doesn’t have a care in the world and is somewhat oblivious as he sets out on his journey with his modest belongings wrapped in a tiny knapsack. The sun is shining above his head, lighting his path, while the mountains behind him show challenges that are yet to come. She noted that man also has a small white dog by his side, representing loyalty, protection, and encouragement as The Fool begins his adventure. The white flower in his left hand represents The Fool’s purity and innocence. The lady explained that The Fool Card symbolized the hope, excitement, and adventure that I would be encountering in my near future. All positive things.
Then she directed my attention to The Fool’s feet.
‘See how he’s standing on the edge of a cliff, with the mountains in the background? He’s looking at the sky, not watching where he’s going. He’s not even listening to the dog, his protector, who’s jumping up, trying to warn him to watch where he’s going. If he doesn’t look down for a second, he’s going to take a final step that will send him off the cliff to a painful fate.’
I asked her what this meant because it seemed like this card was depicting me as a clueless idiot. She said it depended on what my question was. Generally it meant that I was heading on a new path, a new adventure that could bring me great things, particularly in a career or profession, but that I also needed to understand my surroundings and get my bearings before moving forward. (Of course, she didn’t know that I’d spent the past two fucking years getting my bearings, so check and check.) At the same time, she said, I shouldn’t be afraid to jump in and embrace the adventure. It was a great card for a money/career question, but she cautioned that it was a bit more fraught if my question involved love or romance, because it could be an indicator of recklessness and negligence–a moth to a flame situation. Surprisingly for a change, I wasn’t asking about my love life, so I didn’t concern myself with her warning because it didn’t apply to me.
Sidenote: The Fool Reversed (with the card turned upside down) means something else entirely, and I’m glad it didn’t come up that way, because it might have sent me into a tailspin. The Fool Reversed represents recklessness, negligence, stupidity, and distraction. It still depicts a new beginning but also indicates that one is behaving recklessly and irrationally towards others and oneself. In the love arena, it represents lack of commitment, risky, and short-sighted behavior, and pursuit of a romantic adventure that may hold one back from having the kind of love one really wants.
Hmmm. Maybe I should have done two readings.
This reading, for whatever it was worth, made me feel better about my decision to return east for law school, but my uncertainty never disappeared entirely (especially during final exams, interview season, and the bar exam). I was going to be a good kind of Fool. The best kind. I just needed to be aware of my surroundings and listen to the fucking dog.
Thirty-two years later, it’s fair to say that those cards have held up. For the most part, the Road More Traveled has provided me with the predicted bounty of financial security, professional satisfaction, unique experiences and adventures, and a good life overall. No, it hasn’t been perfect or satisfying every day, and it hasn’t played out exactly as I imagined it would when I was 23 years old. But in the macro sense, looking at the forest, not the trees, I’ve had a wonderful and blessed life, the kind of life I would not have rejected back then, when I was so unsure about what I was doing and the choices I was making. Yes, I took the safer and more secure road, but nothing was handed to me either. I’ve had to work hard for everything I have, so the life I have now was not a foregone conclusion. It didn’t just magically happen.
Do I sometimes wonder how The Road Less Traveled might have played out for me if I’d been willing to take a bigger and perhaps more foolish risk three decades ago? What my life would be like now if I had spent two years in Kenya or Guatemala and then joined the Foreign Service? Of course I do. That’s how I’m built. But I’ll never know where that road would have taken me, or if I would have been happier or less happy than I am now (or if I’d even still be alive). The Road Less Traveled exists in a different universe, a different reality. In this one, I chose a different adventure and killed a different skeleton. I would never change the experiences I’ve had, or the fool I’ve been so many times in my life, because they made me into the person I am–an honest and decent, if imperfect, person who knows what he doesn’t know, faces his flaws head on, and tries to learn from his mistakes.
There’s still hope for this brand of Fool, and he don’t need your pity, Mr. T.
